Dimension Fracture (19 page)

incursion

The gunship flew over the Luna base, a small artificial clearing in the deep forest. Dark shapes shifted and darted between the trees. A small group of people dressed in gray uniforms took positions atop the single squat concrete building in the clearing.

“The bulk of the base is below ground,” Amber explained, noting my confusion. “It's going to be very difficult for them to actually enter the base and do any real damage, so I think we're going to be able to push them out.”

“Only if that creepy fucker doesn't show up.” I unsnapped my own harness and slid to the edge of my seat. “The mage who can control these things won't have any trouble destroying this entire complex, no matter how much of it is below ground.”

“We have no reports of human attackers,” the pilot informed me. “Sentries and blockade forces report sixteen demons of various types.”

I peered out the viewport at the battle beginning below, my expression pensive. It didn't look like the demons were really trying very hard to break the defensive lines… I knew they could, considering just how huge they were. It wouldn't be difficult at all for them to just crash right on through.

“They're not attacking, they're holding. Laying siege. You see—there are only two demons on the tarmac, and they're not really doing much but drawing fire. The rest are in the forest, but they're ignoring the sentries.”

“You're right,” Amber agreed. She turned and ducked her head back through the open hatch to the cockpit and said something I couldn't quite hear to the pilot. “We're going to drop on the guardhouse roof. The gunship will come around and give us some fire-support against the demons.”

“Rocket pods and an autocannon should do some good, yeah,” I muttered, wondering just how the hell Luna managed to get their hands on a state-of-the-art military repulsion-jet gunship like this. “Just make sure you don't hit
us
.”

“Can't make any promises if you get too close to my targets,” the pilot came back.

“Don't worry, we'll leave some for you.”

The rear boarding hatch hissed and started to swing open. Down the ramp, about two meters off the edge, was the roof of the guardhouse. Twelve people dressed in gray uniforms and light body armor were concentrating their fire on one of the demons, a giant black-flickering wolf creature with burning green eyes.

“Watch it!” I cried and ducked down as the demon roared and struck. Tendrils of miasma sprouted from its massive shoulders and lashed out, striking the edge of the guardhouse and narrowly missing the gunship.

“We need to get out
now
!”

No kidding. I didn't bother to wait for further instructions and instead just dropped off the edge of the ramp as carefully as I could, trying not to drop all my body's falling weight on my left leg. It didn't work out so well and a hot river of pain shot up my leg, but it wasn't as bad as I expected.

Meilin and Misaki came out next, dropping down around me. Misaki took one look at me and realized my leg was giving me trouble again. She rushed over next to me and supported me with her body.

“I can walk, I can stand, I can fight,” I insisted, not happy to be the focus of that worried and sad look on her face.

“Love, please, you should—”

I shook my head. “No, Misaki. The loose mana—that dark mage is nearby. You can feel it too, can't you?”

Misaki opened her mouth to reply, but Amber came crashing down out of the gunship, nearly bowling us both over as she darted for the edge of the guardhouse. I blinked in astonishment as she just kept going, leaping off and touching down on the tarmac below. With the Shattered Sword in hand, she roared a wordless challenge at the tentacle-wolf demon and exploded into a flurry of sparkling slashes.

“My sister's totally, completely crazy,” Meilin grumbled.

“Maybe not. Look.”

I pointed down at the tarmac where a veritable flood of gray-clad sentries emerged from the woods, falling into formation around Amber as she brandished the Shattered Sword high above her head. Lightning crawled across the blade as she forced mana into the weapon, expanding out in a bubble of charged and compressed air.

Meilin fired two shots from her pistol at the second demon, a giant cat-like monster similar to the ones Misaki and I fought before. “What is she
doing
?”

“She's trying to strip their defenses,” Misaki said in an admiring tone. “That ball of lightning she's creating is converting the air trapped inside into plasma. If she can keep it up without being interrupted…”

Right on cue, the crackling sphere of charged force generated a brilliant burst of superheated and ionized gases. I shielded my eyes from the intense brightness as the jet of plasma caught the demon head-on.

Amber grinned fiercely and swung the Shattered Sword around and up, her strong legs propelling her and the blade in a great uppercut slash that seared through the demon's thick neck muscles and bones.

I ducked as the gunship swooped overhead and opened up on the demons still hiding in the forest. The craft's autocannon dumped a startling volume of fire in short, controlled bursts that the pilot used sparingly, attempting to keep the rest of the demons from assisting their companions.

I didn't know how well my new abilities would work against these creatures, but I sure wasn't doing any good taking potshots at them with a pistol. I set the gun aside on the weapons crate in the center of the roof and focused on the second monster.

The bulk of Luna's security force on the guardhouse was successfully keeping the thing back with nonstop gunfire. Like specters, these things could withstand an enormous amount of punishment and keep on fighting, but unlike specters they didn't have a miasmic core that could be quickly destroyed with a Relic.

Misaki's boosted spell-flame shot out in great blue-white fireballs, exploding against the demon's body and sending it reeling backward as miasma was stripped away from its flesh. The giant cat-thing hissed so loudly my ears rang, its red-glowing eyes staring directly at us.

With the miasma defenses peeled back, the security forces redoubled their efforts, firing as fast as their weapons would allow. I watched with satisfaction as black blood spurted from the wounds, the high-powered rifle rounds burying themselves deeply in the thing's profane flesh. Heartening to be sure, but it'd only be a matter of time before the thing could repair its miasmic armor.

I wasn't going to let it.

My hand came up and I quickly etched a series of simple runic symbols. The silvery-white glow of the invocation brightened and power welled up inside, called through the Relic shard from the astral wellspring. I pointed at the wounded demon's head.

The expected brilliant beam of pure white destruction scythed out from my fingertip and stabbed through the demon's unprotected head, boring through flesh, bone and brain matter in a nanosecond before it flashed out through the other side and blasted a deep divot into the tarmac.

The very dead demon toppled over, its huge body slamming into the ground. I could hear hisses of astonished rage from within the forest as the slain monsters' companions promised to deliver harsh vengeance.

“The fourteen or however many in the forest aren't going to just stay in there forever,” I grunted, glancing at Meilin. She had traded her pistol for an assault rifle from the weapons crate and was carefully firing well-aimed single rounds at any demon head she could find.

“If they all rush in at once, we're not going to get out of this alive.”

“Yeah. I know.”

The gunship hovered about fifty meters above the guardhouse, well out of reach of the demons on the ground. More of them poured out of the forest onto the tarmac; two of them were the wolf-type with miasma tentacles sprouting from their back. They whipped at the gunship, but the pilot was too savvy for that and ascended quickly. The twin rocket pods beneath the flying machine's stubby wings flared to life.

“Down!” I cried and flung myself at Misaki, dropping us both to the concrete. A stream of high-explosive unguided rockets burst from the pods and arrowed directly for the massed group of demons. The explosion blasted great chunks of asphalt and tainted demon-flesh into the air.

A severed paw the size of a dinner table and streaming wisps of miasma flew overhead, barely missing us as it cartwheeled through the air.

“That works,” I marveled, trying to get to my feet. The demons were roaring impotently at the gunship, lashing with their miasma whips, but they couldn't reach it. The remaining creatures scattered, spreading out along the blasted and cratered tarmac in an attempt to avoid the gunship's fire.

“Where's Amber?” Meilin shouted.

“Right here.”

I turned and saw the swordswoman on the other side of the guardhouse as she vaulted up the ladder, carrying something long, dark and bulky slung over her shoulder. I recognized the weapon as a revolving-chamber grenade launcher of the type often used by law enforcement for dispersing unruly crowds. I hoped she had something stronger than tear gas loaded.

“Chief Alex is bringing up some heavy weapons,” she said as she readied the grenade launcher to fire. Her face was ashen and her lips compressed into a grim line. “The gunship pilot says there are even more demons on the way.”

“They waited until we came to help the defenders. Now that we're here, they can destroy this place freely and us along with it. You need to evacuate this base and quick. That gunship's going to run out of ammo eventually.”

“Probably too much to hope that we run out of demons first.” Amber sighed heavily and leaned against the low wall around the edge of the guardhouse roof. She took up aim and fired, lobbing three grenades, one right after the other, directly at the oncoming demons.

Mana flowed through me, drawn in by the Relic fragment, and I inscribed a string of runes into the air. A profusion of glittering white flashes rained down from above, peppering four of the demons with impossibly-sharp blades of light. Blood streamed from dozens of superficial cuts, but their miasma coat absorbed much of the damage.

“You have some sort of way out of here?”

Amber shook her head. “For us, the gunship, but it's getting low on fuel. For everyone else, there's an emergency tram on B12 that leads out of the mountains about a hundred kilometers from here.”

“This place, it's an old fallout shelter for high-level leaders?”

Amber nodded as she loosed another of her grenades. “Yeah. Luna picked it up from the federal government decades ago. We did some expansion and modification and made our home here.”

Explosions ripped across the demonic ranks, but only managing to keep them at bay. We were fighting a losing battle and we all knew it. With so many demons on the tarmac, Amber wouldn't have a chance to harvest any heads if they all rushed her at once. The security force's sustained fire began to become more erratic and I knew they were running low on ammunition.

It wouldn't be long before the demons just absorbed all we could throw at them and moved in for the kill.

“Get the evacuation going,” I snapped, reaching deep inside to draw forth power from the Relic fragment. I traced several runic symbols in silvery-white light and sent forth another storm of magical blades. Demons roared, more in annoyance than true pain, as the energy shards slashed and cut them.

Amber turned around and started yelling into her comm unit. I kept my attention focused on the demons; without her grenades blowing up all over the enemy ranks, they were getting much more bold.

The more I drew from the Relic shard's font of power, the stronger I felt. I was growing more and more accustomed to reaching inside it and drawing upon the font of astral energy, sucking the mana into myself and shaping it into a weapon with which to seriously fuck up my enemies.

It wasn't going to be enough, though.

adumbration

Misaki stood beside me, spell-flame blazing around her hands. I etched runic patterns into the air and struck at the constantly-roaring demons with blades of light, but my attacks were barely doing any damage at all.

The rest of the security force had already gone down into the facility, using the hatch on the roof of the guardhouse to gain access without getting too close to the demons. Meilin went down with them to help direct the evacuation. With her Spell Engine exhausted and no access to fresh quintessence cylinders, she was better utilized helping people escape than taking mostly-useless potshots.

It was just Amber, Misaki and myself now, and we were all just about worn down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Amber place the heavy machine gun on the edge of the guardhouse wall, a brand-new 18mm triple-barrel transportable autocannon taken from who the fuck knew where.

“How much longer do we need to hold?”

Amber squeezed the trigger on the 18mm, sending a line of orange-yellow tracers burning into the nearest demon. The heavy, high-velocity rounds intended for anti-vehicle and anti-materiel destruction plowed through the thing's miasmic armor, punching huge bleeding holes. The demon collapsed with a shrieking wail that felt like a knife stabbing into my brain.

“The trains are loaded and leaving the station,” Amber called out as she picked a new target and unleashed hell on it. It certainly made me feel a little better that we
could
take them out with big enough guns, but this was about all Luna had.

Misaki squeezed my shoulder and pointed up at the sky. I followed her gesture and nodded as the gunship, back from wherever it had gone after it ran out of rockets, swooped down toward us and fired a few bursts from its own autocannon.

Short bursts, and not very effective; the pilot would be almost out of ammunition at this point in the battle. We'd already been fighting for well over half an hour and our supplies were just about exhausted.

“We need to take out the ones with tentacles!” Amber shifted her fire and concentrated a withering hail of lead onto one of the wolf-form demons. “The gunship can't get close enough to pick us up without being knocked out of the sky!”

Misaki leaned over the edge of the guardhouse and blasted a demon that came too close with twin jets of spell-flame. I followed her lead and struck with a disintegrating beam of white energy, punching through the now-vulnerable head and vaporizing whatever passed for a brain in these things.

There were just too many of them now. The demons flickered and seemed to merge into each other as their miasmic armor shifted and blurred their outlines. The tarmac was covered in dozens of the things. More demons continued to pour out of the forest.

It was a very good thing the Luna fortress was way out in the middle of nowhere. If it had been any closer to actual civilization, the situation could have gotten very ugly, very quickly.

“The pilot says we need to get on now or he's going to have to leave,” Amber's voice came from behind me. She sounded almost as tired as I felt. “The gunship is almost out of fuel.”

Fuck. I hazarded a glance back at Amber while Misaki altered the shape of her spell-flame. A wide, diffuse fan of flames poured out from her outstretched palms, but I could see that even she was starting to feel the effects of fatigue. The color of the flames started to change and become more white, then more yellow as the temperature dropped. If her spell-flame lost much more heat…

“Tell the pilot to get out of here!” I shouted, a plan starting to form in my mind.

“How else are we going to escape? The elevator shaft's already been collapsed!”

I cast another storm of energy blades and sent them raining down on a demon that started to paw at the edge of the guardhouse roof. The monster howled in rage and smashed down heavily with both forelimbs, shearing off a section of the low wall ringing the edge of the building.

“Misaki can cast an invocation of flight.” Impatience colored my voice. “Just fucking do it or your pilot and that gunship's going to end up a smoking crater on the tarmac!”

Amber yelled something into her comm and the gunship immediately swerved off, the repulsion jets stuttering as the pilot tried to use as little of his remaining fuel as possible. I hoped he'd be able to make it to the evacuation point before the thing dropped out of the sky out from under him.

Now it was just the three of us. The security chief had already collapsed the elevator tunnel to prevent the demons from following the noncombatants evacuating below. Except for Misaki's magic, we had no other way out. The rippling report of Amber's heavy machine gun continued, blasting demon after demon, but it was obvious that she'd run out of bullets long before they ran out of demons.

I turned to my fiancee. “Misaki, we need to fly and
now
.”

“If I stop, they're going to come all at once!”

“I'm aware of that,” I muttered, trying to think quickly. “You can't keep it up forever; we need to risk it—”

“Karin!”

The moment I heard Misaki's warning, I knew what was coming. The strange dark pressure I'd felt ever since the demon incursion… it was the same oppressive and heavy sensation I'd felt when she'd contacted me in my dreams.

Amber squeezed off a few more bursts of fire, but even she noticed it. That pressure on her spirit, distorting the loose mana all around them. The demons stopped their unearthly howls and roars and all of them came to a halt, lining up in a perfect, unbroken circle around the siege-battered guardhouse.

Two of the demons moved aside and a dark figure walked slowly from within the forest. My eyes narrowed, knowing exactly what I'd see once the figure stepped into the light. The slender build, custom-tailored suit and blood-red necktie—it could be no one else.

I walked to the edge of the guardhouse and stepped into the ladder.

“Karin, what are you
doing
?” Amber demanded. “We've been given a respite; we need to escape—”

I held up a hand to cut her off. “No. If we try to leave that way, the mage could just cancel Misaki's flight spell and we'll be splattered all over the tarmac. We don't have much of a choice but to find out what she wants.”

Amber shivered, looking as frightened as I'd ever seen her. Not that I'd seen her much, but still, she didn't strike me as the type who was easily rattled. I understood well enough how she felt, though.

“Karin…”

“Yeah, Misaki, I know, but if we try to bolt now, she'll just take us out and the demons will eat what's left. We talk to her, it'll put us close, maybe if things go bad we can just blast our way out.”

Misaki didn't look convinced, but she nodded. “Fine. Let's go.”

“Hey, I'm coming, too,” Amber said, her voice somewhat less shaky than I would have expected. I shook my head and held a hand out to stop her, and not just because she looked terrified.

“Stay here. If I raise my hand and three fingers, it means we're in trouble and you should come down and start cutting shit up. Got it?”

“O-okay,” she managed, clearly relieved that she wouldn't have to go anywhere near the creepy mage unless something went wrong.

I stepped into the ladder rung and slowly made my way down to the tarmac. My left leg was still hurting, but I found it surprisingly easy to tune out the pain. Outside of awakening my magic, I had no idea what other changes the Relic shard caused within me when it fused to my body and spirit.

The mysterious mage stood only about twenty meters away. I waited while Misaki climbed down and started to walk beside me. The both of us slowly approached her, keeping our expressions as calm and neutral as we could.

We were both anxious and not a little afraid, but neither of us were willing to let it show. Our walk came to an end when we stood only a little over two meters away. Demons all around us snarled and hissed, straining at the invisible force holding them in place, but none were able to make even the smallest threatening move toward us.

The mage stared at me with unblinking eyes.

“Who are you?”

“I was called Eirene, a long time ago.” Her eyes seemed to unfocus and stare at something that didn't exist in the material world.

“What do you
want
from me?” I demanded.

Eirene's expressionless face seemed to gain some color and life and a faint almost-smile formed. “It is already done. You have transcended now and will become stronger, become
more
. Other humans will awaken. The dark ones have also awakened and will become free.”

“The dark ones?” I echoed. “Do you mean these things?”

“These dark ones have awakened. These dark ones are free and unbound, who have bound living ones to serve as their vessels.”

I snorted derisively. “They don't look very free right now.”

“They
were
free, but I bound them. I take no pleasure in doing so, but I could not let them kill you. You are needed to usher in the approaching dawn.”

Eirene's words were like a strange echo. Nergal, the smarmy blond fashion model lookalike who served as AEGIS's vice-director of crisis management, mentioned halting the approaching darkness.

I wondered if they were talking about the same thing.

“Are
you
going to kill me?”

There was a long pause. “No.”

“But you tried to kill me before,” I pointed out, feeling more than a little fed up with this weird person and their off-putting manner of speech. “You shoved the Relic right through my body! How is that
not
trying to kill me?”

“I did not try to kill you.” Eirene stepped forward, closing the few meters of distance with a smooth motion. I could practically feel Misaki tensing up beside me, and I knew Amber was waiting at the edge of the building, the Shattered Sword gripped tightly.

“What do you call blasting me with that whatever the hell it was, breaking my Relic and then stabbing me with it?” I glared at Eirene balefully. “That wasn't trying to kill me? What the hell else do you call it? You—”

“No.” Eirene held their hands up, their almost-expression looking hurt. “The purpose was not to slay, but to join you with the Relic. The night-bringers would have done the same, eventually, but you would have been under their thrall. They would bind you with machines and make you as a puppet.”

I blinked in surprise. They were clearly talking about AEGIS, the “night-bringers.” The confusion written across my face must have been obvious to anyone who saw it, but Eirene only shrugged. The motion didn't look natural, as if she was unused to normal human mannerisms.

“Are you going to let us leave?”

Another long pause.

“Yes. You
must
leave. The night-bringers are coming here. Many of them.” Eirene's gaze flicked to the right of me, staring at Misaki with those eerie and flat eyes. “You can feel them, spirit of the Relic. They are coming to try and destroy me.”

I was starting to get a headache trying to parse this bullshit, but Misaki tugged on the sleeve of my borrowed jacket. “Karin, I think we should go. She's right; I can feel perturbations in the loose mana. AEGIS operatives are approaching—dozens, all equipped with Spell Engines and who knows what else.”

“If she wants to let us leave, I say we leave,” Amber's voice called out from over near the guardhouse. She'd slid down the ladder to the tarmac, but she stayed as far away from Eirene as she possibly could.

“The car should be over near those trees on the south side,” Misaki noted. “The battle was mostly contained to the north side of the facility, furthest from the gate, so it should still be fine.”

I turned to face Amber, the two of us walking over to her. She looked more than a little pale, her eyes fixated on Eirene anxiously. The mysterious mage was still standing right where we left her, but the demons had moved. Rather than surrounding the guardhouse, they silently repositioned themselves around Eirene in a defensive formation. I felt a little uneasy as I considered how much power it would take to successfully dominate the wills of
that
many of those nightmare creatures.

Misaki's ears swiveled toward the northern end of the compound. “They're approaching from the north. I can hear… at least three gunships and two aerial troop carriers. We only have a few minutes before they get here.”

Eirene nodded. “They are coming. Go.”

“It'll be at least another few minutes before they get here,” I told them, wondering why I was worrying so much about helping the creepy mage who tried to kill us. “You should have plenty of time to get away.”

“I will not.”

Misaki tugged on my sleeve again. “Karin… come
on
. Stop trying to help the creepy mage who tried to kill us.”

My hands fell to my sides and I turned to walk away, following Misaki and Amber across the tarmac toward the relatively undamaged garage. Behind me, demons hissed and growled in eager anticipation, straining at the magical bindings that held them to Eirene's will. The uniform, shrill whine of repulsion jets as the AEGIS strike force came ever closer.